Good news! The first Cumulative Update for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 is available! So finally, we can start upgrading this wonderful new version (… I know, sounds weird ..).
Now, since this version, Microsoft seems to have seriously modified their way to provide cumulative updates.
How to download
The download is not available anymore like it used to be: providing your email address, wait for mail, and download from the mail. I guess that’s a good thing. No, now it’s available from the “Microsoft Download Center“. Lots of Microsoft products (updates) are available there .. so it makes all the sense that also NAV updates become available there. Here is the link to download Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 Cumulative Update 1.
But…
I did have to search a while before I could find my download.. :-/.
You need to select a language. This is strange.. . I should select a country version, not a language. I was searching for “Flemish” – but apparently, also Microsoft doesn’t think that’s a language :-). So, let’s go for “Dutch” .. . All of a sudden, the entire webpage gets reloaded into the Dutch language .. and on top of that, the bloody BE version is NOT available! So we don’t even speak Dutch in Belgium? (well, no, that’s why I was looking for Flemish, wasn’t I .. :-))
Apparently, the BE version is only available when I select “French” .. so I need to struggle my way through the Download Center in French to be able to download the BE version of NAV .. .
Good that I don’t have to download the Russian version any time soon… to not talk about the Czech version, which seems to be lost (sorry, Kamil) ..
There is room for improvement, if you ask me ;-).
Can I still automate the download process?
If you have followed my sessions at the PowerShots last year, or some of my sessions at Directions and NAVTechDays, you might have noticed that I automated the download process of Cumulative Updates (Kamil Sacek created a PowerShell function for it). Well, this doesn’t work anymore (for now.. ). And I don’t know a solution yet .. . There is no complete table of all downloads anymore, not on the page visibly, nor in the source of the webpage (in some kind of hidden JSON or whatever – like before). Nor I find a way to generate the URL from whatever info on the page.
So in short .. a new challenge ahead :-). I do hope the old way of providing CU’s will come back in the near future … because frankly .. this is NOT a good alternative..
The Download
The download itself looks different as well. Instead of a Self-Extracting zip file (basically, an exe-file) – now, it’s just a zip-file. No problem for me. I never used the “Self” in “Self-Extracting” zip. I just renamed the exe to zip, and started turning it into an iso. Basically, I can still do it the same way as I always did it – automated. The structures of the names is still preserved, which is good. I did however have to make a small change to my function “Get-NAVCumulativeUpdateDownloadVersionInfo” .. which is already on github.